Kissinger’s Shadow (9 page)

Last week Nixon invaded Cambodia. With the evident failure of his Vietnamization policy, he accepted a plan the Joint Chiefs have been hawking around Washington for years and which even Johnson, to his credit, refused. Then he traveled to the Pentagon and denounced protesting students as “bums.” When the President of the United States thus creates a national mood, I suppose one cannot be too much surprised if the National Guard of Ohio fails to exercise discrimination.… The reaction has been one of gloom and fury—a fury derived from a sense of impotence.… What do we tell [young people] now? To wait until 1973, by which time God knows how many Americans and Vietnamese, now alive, will be dead?
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It is important to note that Schlesinger's despair concerns
just
the ground invasion of Cambodia. Like most everybody else, he didn't yet know that Nixon and Kissinger had been secretly bombing that country for over a year (and would continue to bomb it for three more).

The “civil war” spiraled out of control. The “credibility gap” widened into a chasm. Dissent begat measures to counter dissent. The bombing of Cambodia turned the White House into a tinderbox of distrust. The ground invasion of Cambodia, announced to the public by Nixon on April 30, 1970, in a rambling, defiant television address, was its spark. Demonstrations spread across the country, with Washington, DC, turning into an “armed camp.” On May 4, Kent State. Then, on May 15, Jackson State. Paranoia fueled more paranoia. Crimes led to more crimes. Kissinger was involved in the early plotting, including wiretaps placed on close friends and associates, the surveillances, and the meetings where the nation's highest officers smeared antiwar dissidents as unhinged treasonous elites and discussed blowing up safes and running paramilitary “black bag” operations.

Still the bombing went on, until August 1973. By that time, Cambodia and Laos were destroyed and South Vietnam doomed. But Kissinger was rising. Even at this late date, he was using Cambodia in his ongoing rivalry with Secretary of State William Rogers, who never came around to thinking that the covert devastation of a neutral country was a good idea. Kissinger threatened to resign if Nixon didn't oust Rogers and give him the Department of State. Nixon wavered. He had hoped to rid himself of Kissinger after his landslide November 1972 reelection. “He's going back to Harvard,” he told a staffer.
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It was Alexander Haig who convinced Nixon to keep Kissinger and give him State. Despite his rivalry with Kissinger, years of planning an illegal and clandestine war had formed a close bond between the two men.
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Rogers resigned on August 16, the day after the bombs finally stopped falling on Cambodia. Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as secretary of state a few days later.

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The bombing of Cambodia was illegal in its conception, deceitful in its implementation, and genocidal in its effect. It destroyed the fragile neutrality that Cambodia's leaders had managed to maintain despite the war next door. It committed Washington to a program of escalation, including its 1970 invasion, which hastened the collapse of Cambodian society. And it achieved neither of its two stated objectives. Hanoi never budged on Kissinger's most important demand—that it withdraw troops from South Vietnam—nor was its ability to conduct military operations in South Vietnam seriously damaged. Did Kissinger ever believe these objectives were realistic? Evidence suggests that he couldn't have, since he had concluded by 1965 that the war was hopeless. The question is, in a way, beside the point, for there is an excess surrounding Kissinger's obsession with Cambodia, an intensity that suggests that the bombing escaped its original rationale and took on a momentum, a “cosmic beat,” of its own.

Already in the 1950s and 1960s, in his days as a scholar and defense intellectual, Kissinger's circular reasoning (inaction needs to be avoided to show that action is possible; the purpose of American power is to create American purpose) and ethical relativism (“what one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one's system”) often led him to propose what he had warned against: power for power's sake. Now in office, he reiterated his fallacy: we have to escalate in order to prove we aren't impotent, and the more impotent we prove to be, the more we have to escalate. Kissinger helped transform Nixon's madman policy from performance, an act meant to convey insanity, into an actual act of moral insanity: the ravaging of two neutral countries.

Executed on the exclusive authorization of one man, Nixon, on the advice of another, Kissinger, the bombing of Cambodia—and Laos, for largely the same reasons—was among the most brutal military operations ever conducted in US history. According to one study, the United States dropped 790,000 cluster bombs on those two countries (as well as on Vietnam), releasing just under a trillion pieces of shrapnel—either ball bearings or razor-sharp barbed darts.
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More bombs were dropped separately on Cambodia and Laos than combined on Japan and Germany during World War II.
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For Cambodia, Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen provide a definitive tally. They write that it “remains undisputed that in 1969–73 alone, around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia.” Moreover, “this figure excludes the additional bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia by the U.S.-backed air force of the Republic of Viet Nam, which also flew numerous bombing missions there in 1970 and 1971.”
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The amount of bombs that hit Laos is even more stunning: US pilots flew, on average, one sortie every eight minutes and dropped a ton of explosives for each and every Laotian, delivering a total of 2.5 million tons in nearly 600,000 runs. Laos, says the Voice of America, is “the most heavily bombed country in history.”
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The devastation wasn't caused just by bombs. Defoliation chemicals did their work. Just over a two-week period (April 18 to May 2, 1969) US–dropped Agent Orange caused significant damage. Andrew Wells-Dang, who has long been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia, writes: “both US Government and independent inspection teams confirmed that 173,000 acres were sprayed (7% of Kompong Cham province), 24,700 of them seriously affected. The rubber plantations totaled approximately one-third of Cambodia's total and represented a loss of 12% of the country's export earnings.” Washington agreed to pay over $12 million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the payout to fiscal year 1972, when the money could be paid without a special request that would have revealed US cross-border activity: “Every effort,” Kissinger wrote, “should be made to avoid the necessity for a special budgetary request to provide funds to pay this claim.”
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In his testimony before the Senate on the Cambodia bombing, Creighton Abrams, commander of the US military in Vietnam, said that the “principle limitations [to the air assault] were civilian population.” Not so much. According to Kiernan, a professor of history at Yale University, “from 1969 to 1973, the US bombing spread out across Cambodia and killed over 100,000 Khmer civilians.”
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Fewer people were killed in Laos, but only because the country is less populated. It is estimated that 30,000 Laotians died in the campaign. But it is hard to say. In 1972, Nixon asked “how many did we kill in Laos?” Ron Ziegler, White House press secretary, guessed, “Maybe ten thousand—fifteen?” Kissinger concurred: “In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen.”
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These are ongoing crimes. As many as about 30 percent of the bombs dropped by the United States, the vast majority under Kissinger's tenure, did not detonate. In Laos, there exist an estimated 80 million unexploded cluster bombs, hidden below a thin layer of soil and packed with ball bearings. In addition to the roughly 30,000 Laotians who died under the bombing, these devices continue to kill hundreds every year, a total of 20,000 as of 2009. Many more are scarred and maimed. In Cambodia as well, delayed explosions continue to kill.

Some especially targeted areas of fertile land should be off-limits to human traffic. Laotians and Cambodians, though, are poor: to not farm could mean to die. Yet when their plows or feet hit these bombs, many find that to farm is to die. In 2007 in Laos, Por Vandee was rice farming with his wife and three sons when one of his sons hit an unexploded ordnance with his hoe. Vandee was knocked unconscious and when he awoke, he learned that two of his sons were dead and the other had brain injuries. Others die or are wounded trying to collect the bombs to sell as scrap metal.

“There are parts of Laos where there is literally no free space. There are no areas that have not been bombed,” one aid worker recently said. “And, when you are in the villages now, you still see the evidence of that. You still see bomb craters. You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage and unexploded ordnance just lying around in villages and it's still injuring and killing people today.” Forty percent of the victims are children.
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Long before he and Nixon escalated the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, Henry Kissinger had given a good deal of thought to the problem of democracy, to what, in his 1954 doctoral dissertation, he called the “incommensurability” between domestic politics and foreign policy. In modern democratic societies, politics are founded on principles thought to be absolute and timeless—civil equality, political freedom, and due process—applicable to all people, everywhere, at all times. Diplomacy, however, reveals these ideals to be, by definition, negotiable and their application contingent on political expediency. The interstate system is made up of competing polities, each representing unique cultures and values, each with its own history and interests. Wars, crises, and diplomatic tensions may occur over any given issue. But sustained threats to the international system appear when one nation insists that its parochial “version of justice” is universal and tries to impose it on other nations. “The international experience of a people is a challenge to the universality of its notion of justice,” Kissinger wrote, “for the stability of an international order depends on self-limitation, on the reconciliation of different versions of legitimacy.”
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For Kissinger, the incongruity between domestic absolutism and international relativism was more than a technical problem. It was primal, for it forced nations to confront the fact that there were limits to their “will-to-infinity,” that ideals heretofore thought to be in harmony with the heavens were actually just really their own particular thing.

Kissinger dwelled awhile on the danger statesmen face when they point out to their nation's people that they are not, in fact, the world, that their aspirations are not boundless, that other peoples, with different interests and experiences, exist. Unwilling to accept these limits, citizens often stage “an almost hysterical, if subconscious, rebellion against foreign policy.” The most common expression of this rebellion, Kissinger argued, is to impose an impossibly high test of purity on diplomats, limiting their ability to compromise with, or even talk to, envoys of nations deemed to be immoral, unnatural, and beyond the pale.

Prevented from performing their duty, foreign policy makers become something like “heroes in classical drama who [have] a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to [their] fellow-men.” They often “share the fate of prophets,” wrote Kissinger, in that “they are without honor in their own country.” This is so because their job is to treat the very thing their citizens cherish most—a sense of themselves as unique and eternal—as a mere “object for negotiation.” Trucking and bartering, then, in the international realm becomes a “symbol of imperfection, of impure motives frustrating universal bliss.” The ink on any given international treaty might lay out the protocols of this or that specific agreement or compromise. The thing itself, though—the very fact that one has to compromise—is death, smelling of decay, of transience, of the fleetingness of existence.

Thus the double-bind burden of statesmen. They need to represent the aspirations of their people, yes, and strive to resist the Spenglerian rot. But they also must gently accommodate citizens to the fact of mortality. They need to use their art to help their nation admit its limitations, accepting that its ideals are not timeless, its morals not pristine. “The statesman must therefore be an educator,” Kissinger wrote; “he must bridge the gap between a people's experience and his vision.”

These are subtle observations, the product of a young man's probing mind methodically building, as he once put it, his “conceptual structure.” But what is most remarkable is that they were written in the early 1950s, a moment of extraordinary trust when it came to American diplomacy. Maybe Kissinger was thinking of Woodrow Wilson's inability to sell his League of Nations to the American people. But that failure, by the time Kissinger composed his reflections on the relationship between democracy and diplomacy, was decades old. The New Deal, World War II, Allied victory over Nazism, and then the Cold War had cemented an extraordinary degree of unanimity among the American people.
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The White House and the foreign policy establishment operated with nearly unquestioned autonomy and legitimacy (Rick Perlstein writes that between 1947 and 1974, around four hundred bills had been introduced in Congress to establish legislative oversight of intelligence agencies; all were voted down).
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In other words, the problem Kissinger warned against in 1954 largely didn't exist. Conservative defense analysts like Kissinger complained about the lack of will in the postwar years among citizens to fight small or major wars. But that's not the kind of hysterical filibustering of diplomats that Kissinger is describing in his dissertation. Through to the mid-1960s, voters embraced a robust internationalism; statesmen didn't have a “difficult task in legitimizing their programmes domestically”; the press was decidedly not adversarial, most social scientists saw themselves as facilitators, not opponents, of the Cold War; theologians and intellectuals provided moral and ethical support for containment; and the legislature and judiciary, for the most part, minded their own business when it came to foreign policy. Diplomats, in other words, weren't being cast out of their homeland like dishonored prophets or Greek heroes.